I’m going to be talking about abuse here, just as a warning for anyone reading this.

I absolutely believe conversion therapy is abusive. I’d like to answer this followup in two parts.

First, I think that conversion therapy should be illegal. I believe that the companies and organizations hosting those services should be shut down and that the people operating them should be investigated and prosecuted if their practices constitute defined definitions of abuse, such as physical punishment, forced isolation, and so on. The organizations sponsoring them should be fined and dissolved. That’s going after one end of the problem.

The second one is looking at the parents. It doesn’t matter whether they think it’s abusive or not, any more than a man who beats his wife because she deserves it thinks he’s just giving her discipline. It’s abuse.

However, this is another one of those indicators I was talking about. It’s part of a pattern of behaviors, but again I think we’d need more information on the parents’ conduct to their kid to establish whether removing them from the home would result in an improvement in their life going forward. It’s not like we have a clone army of Jonathan van Nesses to rehome these poor kids with.

Abuses that I’ve seen LGBT kids suffer under include withholding of food, physical abuse, and what amounts to forced incarceration. I’ve spoken to kids who have had their clothes physically torn from their bodies, resulting in injury. One of the most common ones you see is children being thrown out onto the streets. I think that under those circumstances, the state should be empowered to act. That doesn’t necessarily mean taking the child from their parents, but it might. There’s also things like court mandated counseling and required followup visits from child services. Any intervention has to be proportional to the facts of the given case.